Wake Up and Live - Chapter 2 - The Will to Fail

Chapter 2
FROM the disciples of Schopenhauer and Freud, of Nietzche and Adler, we have all become conversant with such phrases as the Will to Live and the Will to Power.
Chapter 2
Wake Up and Live

These phrases, representing - sometimes to the verge of overstatement - drives of the organism towards fulfillment and growth, correspond to truths of experience with which each of us is familiar. We have seen children struggle to make themselves and their personalities felt; as young people we have contended for a chance to try our own emerging forces; after long illness we have felt the tide of returning strength in our veins. We know that any average man caught in unfortunate circumstances will put up with poverty, distress, humiliation with conditions which an onlooker will sometimes consider as much worse than death; and that only the presence of a will to continue living can account for the tenacity with which a man in such circumstances clings to the mere right to breathe and exist.
Furthermore, we first experience and then later turn to realize the process of growth in ourselves. The individual, emerges from childhood into adolescence, from adolescence into maturity; and at each of these crisis we find that the activities and interests of the old period are being replaced by those of the new, that Nature is preparing the organism for its new role in the world, is actually reconciling us to the new demands on us by showing us pleasures and rewards in the oncoming state which will replace those we must abandon.
But the idea of another will, a counter-balancing will, the Will to Fail, the Will to Death, is not so readily accepted. For a while it was one of the tenets of psychoanalysis, for instance, that no individual could actually imaginatively encompass the idea that he might cease to be. Even the death-dreams and suicide threats of deeply morbid patients were held to be grounded solely in ideas of revenge: the explanation was that the patient thought of himself as living on, invisible, but able to see the remorse and regret caused by his death in those by whom he thought himself ill-treated.

Wake Up and Live - Chapter 2 - The Will to Fail

2.
The Will to Fail - 1
Chapter 2
FROM the disciples of Schopenhauer and Freud, of
Nietzche and Adler, we have all become conversant with
such phrases as the Will to Live and the Will to Power.
These phrases, representing - sometimes to the verge of
overstatement - drives of the organism towards fulfillment
and growth, correspond to truths of experience with which
each of us is familiar. We have seen children struggle to
make themselves and their personalities felt; as young
people we have contended for a chance to try our own
emerging forces; after long illness we have felt the tide of
returning strength in our veins. We know that any average
man caught in unfortunate circumstances will put up with
poverty, distress, humiliation with conditions which an
onlooker will sometimes consider as much worse than
death; and that only the presence of a will to continue living
can account for the tenacity with which a man in such
circumstances clings to the mere right to breathe and exist.
Furthermore, we first experience and then later turn to
realize the process of growth in ourselves. The individual,
emerges from childhood into adolescence, from adolescence
into maturity; and at each of these crisis we find that the
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3.
The Will to Fail - 2
activities and interests of the old period are being replaced
by those of the new, that Nature is preparing the organism
for its new role in the world, is actually reconciling us to the
new demands on us by showing us pleasures and rewards in
the oncoming state which will replace those we must
abandon.
But the idea of another will, a counter-balancing will, the
Will to Fail, the Will to Death, is not so readily accepted. For
a while it was one of the tenets of psychoanalysis, for
instance, that no individual could actually imaginatively
encompass the idea that he might cease to be. Even the
death-dreams and suicide threats of deeply morbid patients
were held to be grounded solely in ideas of revenge: the
explanation was that the patient thought of himself as living
on, invisible, but able to see the remorse and regret caused
by his death in those by whom he thought himself ill-
treated.
Freud, indeed, analyzing shell-shocked patients after the
War, issued a monograph in which he stated that he had
occasionally found dreams that indicated sincere death-
wishes. This monograph is full of some of the best of
Freud's speculations and suggestions; but as for the
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4.
The Will to Fail - 3
appearance in popular psychologies of the idea that there
could logically be a deathward current running through our
lives, it is as though the thesis had never been suggested.
Yet death is as much a fact of experience as birth and
growth; and if Nature prepares us for each new phase of life
by closing off old desires and opening new vistas, it does not
seem too difficult to think that we are, always, being slowly,
gently reconciled to our eventual relinquishment of all we
hold dear as living creatures. And withdrawal from struggle,
abandonment of effort, releasing of desire and ambition
would be normal movements in an organism which was
being gently wooed away from its preoccupation with life.
It is for this reason that we are entitled to look upon the
Will to Fail as a reality.
Now, If inertia, timorousness, substitute activity, effortless
effort, quiescence, and resignation were found only at the
end of life, or when we were drained by sickness or fatigue,
if they never handicapped us when we should be in the full
flood of our vital powers, there would be no reason at all for
attacking this Will to Fail as if it were - as indeed it is - the
arch-enemy of all that is good and effective in us. But when
it appears in youth or full maturity it is as symptomatic of
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5.
The Will to Fail - 4
something wrong - deeply, internally wrong - with one's life
as untimely drowsiness is symptomatic of ordinary bodily ill
health.
And if it were easily seen for the black-hearted villain it is,
when it arrives out of its due time, it would be easy to fight.
But almost always we are well within its power before we do
more than suspect rarely and vaguely that all is not as it
should be with us. We are so accustomed to speak of failure,
frustration, timidity, as negative things, that it is like being
invited to fight windmills when we are urged to fight the
symptoms of failure.
In youth we seldom recognize the symptom; in ourselves.
We explain our reluctance to getting started as the natural
timidity of the tyro; but the reluctance stays, the years go,
and we wake in dismay to find that what was once a
charming youthful diffidence in us is now something quite
different, sickly and repellent. Or we find a convenient
domestic situation to bear the brunt of excusing us for never
having got to work in earnest. We could not leave this or
that relative lonely and defenseless. Then the family grows,
scatters, and we are left alone, the substitute activity at
which we had been so busy is taken remorselessly away
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6.
The Will to Fail - 5
from us, and we are sick and terrified at the idea of turning
back to take up the long abandoned plans.
Or we have the best of all reasons for not doing as well as we
might. Most of us are under the necessity of choosing
between work and starvation, and the employment we were
able to find when it was imperative that we should begin
earning is not work for which we are ideally suited. When
marriage and the raising of a family have been undertaken,
the necessity is all the more urgent. We might be willing to
wait through a few thin years if no one but ourselves would
suffer, but to ask others to do so takes more selfishness, and
more courage, than most of us can muster.
Especially in America, where marriages for love are the rule,
most young people start out on their married life with little
more than their health, youth, and intelligence as capital.
We are accustomed to think of the European idea of asking
a dot, a dower, from the bride's family as somehow ignoble
and mercenary. Yet insisting on that little reserve fund of
money with which to meet the demands of establishing a
new household has much to recommend it, and the fact that
we have no such custom in this country may be one reason
why America, the much-vaunted Land of Opportunity, can
show so many men and women of middle age wasting
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7.
The Will to Fail - 6
themselves in drudgery, filling positions which bring them
no joy, and looking forward to a future which at its happiest
promises years of monotony, and at its worst the nightmare
of poverty-ridden unemployment.
This necessity to fall upon the first work we can find is alone
enough to explain why so few of us ever manage to bring
our plans to fruition. Often, at first, we have a firm intention
of not losing sight of our real goal, in spite of the fact that
we must make a living at uncongenial work. We plan to
keep an eye on our ambitions, and to work at them by hook
or crook - evenings, weekends, on vacations. But the nine-
to-five work is tiring and exacting; it takes super-human
strength of character to go on working alone when the rest
of the world, is at play, and when we have never had any
evidence that we should be successful if we continued,
anyway. And so without realizing it we are swept into the
current of the Will to Fail. We are still moving, and we do
not see that our motion is down stream.
Most of us disguise our failure in public; we disguise it most
successfully from ourselves. It is not hard to ignore the fact
that we are doing much less, than we are able to do, very
little of what we had planned even modestly to accomplish
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8.
The Will to Fail - 7
before a certain age, and never, probably, all that we had
hoped. One reason it is so easy to deceive ourselves is that
somewhere along the way we seem silently to enter into a
sort of gentleman's agreement with our friends and
acquaintances. "Don't mention my failure to me," we tacitly
plead, "and I will never let the hint that you are not doing
quite all I should expect of you cross my lips."
This tactful silence is seldom broken in youth or in the early
middle years. Until then, the convention is that at any
moment we may get into our stride. A little later and the
silence is relaxed. There comes a time when it is safe to
smile ruefully and admit that the hopes we went out to meet
the world with were too high and much too rosy,
particularly those hopes we had held for our own
performance. In the fifties - and sometimes earlier - it is
usually safe enough to do a little disarming and semi-
humorous grumbling; after all, few of our contemporaries
are in a position to say "Why can't you start now?" And yet
some of the greatest work in the world, many of the world's
irreplaceable masterpieces, were done by men and women
well past what we too superficially consider their prime.
So we slip through the world without making our
contribution, without discovering all that there was in us to
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9.
The Will to Fail - 8
do, without using the most minute fraction of our abilities,
either native or acquired. If we manage to be fairly
comfortable, to get some respect and admiration, a taste of
"a little brief authority" and some love, we think we have
made a good bargain, we acquiesce in the Will to Fail. We
even pride ourselves on our shrewdness, not suspecting
how badly we have been cheated, that we have settled for
the compensations of death, not the rewards of life.
If the elaborate game that we all play with ourselves and
each other never came to an end - never ran down for a
moment so that we suddenly saw that it was only a game
after all - the Will to Fail might urge us all gently downhill
till we came to rest at its foot, and no one would dream of
protesting. But the game has such a way of breaking off
sometimes, right at its most amusing spot; and we suddenly
wonder why we are running about like this, how we happen
to be playing away at hide-and-seek as if our lives depended
on it, what became of the real life we meant to lead while we
have been off doing nothing, or busy at the work that
provides us with no more than our bread and butter.
Sometimes the moment passes and is forgotten until long
after, if ever remembered at all. But some of us never forget
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10.
The Will to Fail - 9
it. If we go on with the game, it turns into a nightmare, and
how to wake out of it and get back into reality becomes our
whole preoccupation. Then sometimes the nightmare seems
to deepen; we try one turn after another which looks as if it
led to freedom, only to find ourselves back in the middle of
Alice's Looking Glass Garden beginning the hunt all over
again.
Yet we can escape; and again, rather like Alice, by seeming
at first to go backward: by admitting that there may be a
real Will to Fail, and next, that we may be its victims.
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11.
The Will to Fail - 10
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